New disciplines are inevitably built upon shifting sands. Job titles have widely different meanings across industries and firms. Respect and acceptance from the C-Suite is often grudging at best. And probably most importantly of all, you still have to re-explain to Aunt Sally what you do for a living every Thanksgiving. Your brother, the accountant, does not share this burden.

However, underlying the shifting sands of the emerging customer experience discipline is a solid layer of bedrock. When the telephone was invented, many of the jobs, like telephone repairman, that went with it were completely new. Not so with customer experience.

Taking care of customers has been around since the dawn of time; we’re just a lot more scientific about it now.

For instance, marketing research and the analytic techniques associated with it have been developed over many, many decades now — and are simply evolving along with the technology and the nature of consumers to be more holistic in approach and more mindful of the idea of a total customer experience.

Neuroscience, a field which has simply exploded in the last decade due to technological advances, has given us incredible insights into why customers do what they do. And as we suspected, they are a lot more irrational than anyone would like to admit.

And don’t forget behavioral economics, another burgeoning field of research that has greatly enhanced our understanding of how customers behave.

The excitement that one feels around customer experience thinking both here at NextGen and in general has a lot to do with the incredible technological advances that are fueling our understanding of customers, but those advances do not only offer answers, they create questions as well.

As you walk the halls talking to CX professionals from around the world, you hear many common themes. How do I prove ROI when nothing like this CX initiative has been done at our firm before? What weaknesses in the customer experience do I address first when I can’t quantify the specific return? How are our customers’ expectations being formed and how can we influence that process?

The customer experience disciplines are truly at an exciting place in their evolution. We do not have all the answers, but we have a lot more than we used to — and a lot better questions as well.

By Adam Toporek. Adam Toporek is the author of Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines, as well as the founder of the popular Customers That Stick(TM) blog and co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast. Adam is the founder of CTS Service Solutions, a consultancy specializing in high-energy customer service workshops that teach organizations and frontline teams how to deliver Hero-Class(TM) customer service.

If you do customer service right and take care of the little things, it sure puts a lot of credit in the bank when something doesn’t go right. I think you are on to something…:).Bill Dorman recently posted..Throw this dog a bone…